Bjoern

How do the Reality Expansion Packs stack up against Accusim?

My understanding is that Dassault wants to have the 8X simulated as exactly as possible as part of the licensing agreement, which is why it's taking Aerobask so long.

My RapidAPI key still seems to work just fine for LiveTraffic.

That notepad app from the preview video is neat. Is there one for X-Plane?

And this is the entire point I am trying to make: This is absolutely inadequately communicated by Laminar.

Okay, holidays are over, new year has arrived, now where is 12.1.0b1, Laminar?! 😛

Frankly, LR should bridge the gap between industry standards and their end specifications with comprehensible, practical examples, because it's not about some industry professionals who are looking for a new meadow with milkable cash cows, but the grassroots freeware peasant who's interested in getting into the cattle and dairy business. Period.

While this does explain the technical apects of the material model, there are ZERO practical examples to set up a given material using a freely available tool. 90 % of developers do not care about how F0 = 0 is unrealistic, but instead how to plug this and that into material slots and what to do to obtain a workable result for X-Plane without banging their head on the desk for hours trying to figure out a workflow. Establishing workflows with enough experience isn't an issue. The issue is Johnny Newface over there, working on his favorite airfield as his first foray into content creation for X-Plane and still unwilling to pay for any utilities. And as I see it, X-Plane's documentation simply does not adequately cater to him, providing at least rough and practical guidelines from start to finish. Same if Johnny was an aspiring aircraft developer. There is no cohesive, official narrative on how to make an aircraft for XP12 with everything that's included, i.e. flight model, fmod, art assets (Dan Klaue's tutorials are out of date. Period.). If "the other simulator" cares much more adequately to the needs of prospective developers in terms of tools and documentation, there's no wonder why it gets all the add-on attention.

Substance is horribly expensive, ArmorPaint costs money as well and Blender's PBR texture baking still requires manual intervention to produce an X-Plane compliant material (which is hardly documented).

Well, you know what to do then: Learn the basics. FlyWithLua has a good manual and a large collection of example scripts.

Are you running Zink?

You forget that the "big boy simulators" at big airlines are a mere product of a supplier with a supply chain. So if the software supplier in said chain decides that something on an X-Plane basis works for them, gets their solution past the certification authorities and to the manufacturer of said simulators, the next major upgrade at any moloch with a tail logo might just as well use XP is some capacity.

FlyWithLua. Finding out the values of your input axis and buttons is the crucial part, the rest is a lot of "if"s and "then"s. Writing Lua scripts should be manageable if you can at least read C and Python.

Well, it's all a spiral. Devs increase prices to cover expenses, users expect more accuracy and complexity because of the increased pricing. Better tools facilitating workflows and proper documentation would help a lot to minimize frustration from trial & error. As an example, the workflow for wiper trails is straight from a KGB torture manual, it's easier to find Atlantis than some official guidance on creating PBR textures, previewing textures for repaints requires more improvisation than on Apollo 13 and there's a scientific dispute about the oldest writings on Earth - Egyptian hieroglyphs or X-Plane's SDK plugin code examples. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not sure what flak you mean regarding Carenado. If it was about not fixing reported bugs and then quietly and completely abandoning their products then yes, every shell was rightfully deserved.

Different avionics fit including antennae, less insulation, navigator station instead of luggage compartment, astrodome, reinforced floor, the really obvious loading door for oversized cargo, no lavatory in the back, sawn off tailcone for a tow hook. And that's just off the top of my head. Even their advertised "DC-3" isn't a DC-3, but a modernized C-47. Good models regardless. Yes, but all it does is tie the tail wheel to rudder input to make it steerable. Torque still needs to be accounted for. Good combination; lots of fun.

Well, the writing was on the wall the minute that MSFS2020 was announced. And I doubt that LM cares about armchair pilot market share, as long as they retain their revenue from commercial contracts. Familiar names for longtime end-users. You need to get out more to mingle with the plebejans, Goran. 😉 Part of this is Laminar's fault for providing inadequate, partially outdated documentation of their SDK. Streamline the content creation process and developers will come flocking.

The only DC-3 out there is LeadingEdgeSimulations', the rest are C-47s, which are not DC-3s.

Well, a third party aircraft may eat up to 20% of the FPS attained in an equivalent default aircraft. Beyond that, it becomes a tough sell.

I don't buy that. While there were some cases of espionage, as per the Wiki article, most of the documents had no effect on the 144s design because they arrived too late (per the german equivalent of aforementioned article) to influence the 144's design and initial building process. What I think is much more plausible is that the Soviet Ministry of Aviation was a keen reader of western aviation magazines and these usually are chock full of images and information about present and future projects, at least on the civilian side which are not subject to security classification. So some committee saw a design drawing of Concorde, the 2707 or 2000, shoved it over to TSaGi to run the numbers on it, got too enthusiastic over the ensuing "Yep, these could work" and wanted to score another first for soviet scientific and industrial might within a very narrow time frame. The result was a principally workable design with some shoddy manufacturing and too many cut corners to fulfil the schedule. The entire motive for feeding false information would have implied a race between both designs, but there never was one as proven by a leasurely eight years of development testing for Concorde vs one and a half or so for the Tu-144. Also, purposefully feeding false information to a competitor that would endanger the lives of innocents kind of violates unwritten rules of an industry very much intent of serving the benefit of everybody, no matter what side of a curtain one is on. Case in point: Buran vs Shuttle Orbiter. Superficially, they were carbon copies, but very different underneath the skin. The good thing about that project was that there was no need to score a first, so the entire scheme just may have worked out as well for them as the shuttle had for NASA.

What @mSparks said. PlaneMaker order matters. The load manager utility for a tool I'm working just lets users decide on the refueling sequence, simply because fuel systems just come in too many sizes and shapes.

Poked Jan to do a video on icing a few days ago over at the Org and look what happened... 🤣 (Yes, yes, I should have asked for fixed rain/4000 FPS on a 486/3721412354 x Anti-Aliasing/DLSS 6.9 with quadruple 8k frame generation/102% screw head accurate default aircraft/default scenery that features the ugly garden gnome in front of your house/the other usual things...instead.)

Yep, Dan and Al are more on the military side of things. But still, the Blender learning curve is worth it for good (you can modify everything) and bad (you want to modify everything). And the community always needs more people with "do" skills as there is way, WAY too much "want" around.

LES' rendition is a bit dated in the visual arena and not for Linux anyway and the Q4XP disqualifies itself for (reportedly) being a complete framerate hog.

Zibo's 737 is probably my most flown aircraft in XP. Near perfection despite the bugs that occasionally creep in during an update. ToLiss A321 for payware airliner perfection. VSKYLABS He-162 for being actually challenging to handle in almost all flight phases. Carenado's SAAB 340B for being the best overall turboprop airliner package out there. JRX Bo-105 for being fun...for a helicopter.

If I can't find a good all-AMD laptop for my next one, I may just go for Apple as well. The AMD + NVidia combo prevalent on 90% of performance-oriented laptops is just junk outside of Windows.